Translations should be in mouse over, thoughts and remembrances in italics.

Thanks to noandwhere for betaing and for prompting me to post this *hugs*

Yesterday is the only place we’ll ever go

“Thought you’d be taller.” Mal’s staring into space, quite literally through the window at the Black, bent on keeping his gaze from the man who stands beside him. The man who brings up more emotion than Mal would have liked. Mayhap a lot of it is anger and he wants to turn around and show him just that, but a lot of it’s something else too. Something Mal pushed away a long time ago.

“Taller?” Simon grins, folding his arms, seeming oblivious despite Mal’s rigid back. “Really, why?

“Just thought you would be taller, sparkly, that sorta thing,” Mal grunts the words, turning to Simon, unable to keep his eyes from the doctor’s. It’s been too long since he’s heard that voice, never mind the grin that somehow makes Simon seem freer. Just a shame he couldn’t be like that when he was my medic, guess being a fugee puts too much of a strain an’ bother.

“Don’t know what I was thinkin’, damn good to see you though.” The words come from his lips in a sudden sentence that leaves an uncomfortable silence between them. Simon’s standing so close, too damn close for Mal’s liking and the Captain takes great pains to move around him.

He isn’t sure why Simon’s back, been three long years yet he chose now; why now of all times especially so close to Christmas. Mal’s not one for such festivities, not believing in much more than the will of people and Fate that the ‘verse has to offer, but the rest of the crew like it. Time they pull together without having to be working on something, without having to worry. Kaylee’s idea to start with, a tradition they carried on with, though the first Christmas on Serenity for Simon and River wasn’t the festivities any of them had planned.

Mourning Book and Wash, the holiday a bleak reminder rather than a celebration, Mal had been tense and merely going though the motions,